Warren Bennis, Leadership Pioneer

The sad news came over the weekend that Warren Bennis has died. For us at HBR it is the loss of a long-time author and friend. Many, many more will miss him, too, as a teacher and adviser.

Let’s define “long-time”: Warren’s first piece in HBR appeared in 1961. It was called a “Revisionist Theory of Leadership,” and that is what it delivered. A half-century later, its message does not sound so revisionist: that in a business environment marked by increasingly complexity and constant change, organizations require not autocrats at the top, but leaders with more humanistic, democratic styles. (For shorthand, Bennis liked the phrase from “macho to maestro.”) At the time, however, corporate titans were very unlikely to see things that way.

The revision Warren helped to bring about happened on a different level, too. Before 1961, the very topic of leadership wasn’t standard HBR fare. Management was about effective structuring of enterprises and administration of their workings. On the fact that some executives had the ability to inspire, motivate, and discern the challenges of the future better than others, management theory was largely silent. This was ineffable territory, not suited to a discipline aspiring to be scientific.

Warren liked to call himself lucky. In the last piece he wrote for HBR, a personal reflection, he even claimed that the keys to his successful career were “inglorious” ones: ambition, insecurity, labor, and luck. But as the old saying goes, people can make their own luck. The fact is that he seized on leadership as a topic when it wasn’t taken seriously, and stayed with it as it rose in legitimacy – indeed, helped to make it important as his own insights evolved based on constant, thoughtful interactions with real leaders.

Why did he gravitate to leadership in the first place? Warren credited various influences, including Douglas McGregor, whose exposition of Theory X versus Theory Y famously opened managers’ eyes to better ways of managing people. McGregor was president of Antioch College when Warren arrived there fresh from World War II, highly attuned to the dynamics between leaders and those who depend upon them. But it’s hard not to believe that the very fact of his name also swayed him. Warren Gemaliel Bennis, born 1925, was named after a U.S. president whose popularity was just then at its peak after his unexpected death in office – but whose legacy would very soon be tarnished forever as scandals came to light. Carrying the name of a leader in disrepute must surely have set young Warren’s mind to thinking about what makes some legacies great.

As the decades of his career passed, Warren continued to sail unafraid into topics that were hard to study but harder to ignore. He looked at “The Leader as a Storyteller” (1996) and at the formative moments that made leaders capable, in “Crucibles of Leadership” with Bob Thomas (2002) and in “The Seven Ages of the Leader” (2004). He wrote about leaders’ capacity for wisdom in “Making Judgment Calls” with Noel Tichy (2007) and about how leaders affect the cultures of their organizations in “What’s Needed Next: A Culture of Candor,” with James O’Toole (2009). In his earliest writings, he often looked far ahead – as in his declaration in 1964 that “Democracy is Inevitable” – and in his later writings, inevitably, he did some looking back.

Warren might have been, as he claimed, ambitious, insecure, hard-working, and lucky. But he was also charming, gracious, self-reflective, generous, full of good humor – and ever optimistic. In an interview with HBR, occasioned by his memoir Still Surprised, Warren suggested he might yet have another book in him:

I’m thinking, I’m not yet serious about this, but it may come that my next book will be called one word – and I’m not a particularly religious person, but the word is a powerful word: it’s Grace. I think that may be just the name for a book which is going to deal with issues of generosity, respect, redemption, and sacrifices. All of which sound vaguely spiritual, but all of which I think are going to be required for leadership.

Grace never made it to bookstore shelves. But the people who had the privilege of knowing and working with Warren got the content of that book in his presence.